Northern Ireland Economic Conference 2025

Creating good jobs, promoting regional balance, raising productivity and reducing carbon emissions

The performance of the Northern Ireland economy remains a challenge. Budgetary pressures mean that spending is constrained, at a time when Northern Ireland’s economy needs to address long-standing issues such as being a laggard in terms of productivity and having high rates of working age economic inactivity. To address these challenges the Economy Minister Caoimhe Archibald MLA is pursuing a strategy to: create good jobs, promote regional balance in the economy, raise productivity and achieve a net zero carbon economy by 2050. Underpinning these four strategic aims, the Department’s skills agenda has been recalibrated and a range of interventions to align with these objectives has been proposed.

Key issues to be addressed at this year’s conference:

• Global and UK economic outlook
• Medium term economic outlook for Northern Ireland
• A comparative analysis of economies, North and South
• Narrowing the productivity gap
• Creating good jobs and tackling economic inactivity
• Addressing regional balance
• Achieving net zero by 2050
• Assessing the impact of trade tariffs
• Recalibrating the skills agenda
• Promoting innovation and R&D
• Analysing public expenditure
• Infrastructure investment as an economic driver